When I first came across this passage in my first year of graduate study at Cambridge, it scarcely filled me with confidence; a howl of impotent rage at the complexities of classical geography is not, after all, the best sentiment to encounter when embarking on just such a ‘big undertaking’. The following months of study justified some of those fears, and allayed others. Consequently, when I included it as an epigraph to my completed doctoral dissertation it was with mixed feelings of hubris and relief. Now, as I recycle the quotation for a second time after several more years of grappling with the delights of classical geography and the thought that followed in its wake, my own feelings are rather clearer. Big undertaking as it was, if I managed to escape the anguish that Cicero pours forth in his letter to Atticus, this was due in no small part to the help offered to me by countless advisors, friends and colleagues over the course of its genesis and composition.

The doctoral thesis upon which this book is based was generously funded by a substantial grant from the British Academy Arts and Humanities Research Board, augmented by supplementary funding from Trinity College, Cambridge.